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Living Below The Line

Enough food is produced twice over every year than is needed to feed the world and yet 1.4 billion people live on $1.25 a day or less! Why?!

1. Governments and International agencies are neglecting the importance of agriculture relevant to poor people!
2. The current worldwide economic crisis.
3. The significant increase of food prices in the last several years which has been devastating to those with only a few dollars a day to spend.
I believe the reason behind all this poorness, poverty, hunger, malnutrition comes down to the fact that the rich are greedy! Mother Teresa said: “It is poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish” but I say it’s us to decide the continuity of this catastrophic issue!

Hugh Evans has created the Global Poverty Project that catalyze the movement to end extreme poverty. And one of the campaigns they started is Live Below The Line and almost 11,000 are participating from the UK, US and AUS to spread awareness about extreme poverty and to do some fundraising for the Global Poverty Project. I myself decided to be part of this challenge (though I live in Jordan)… Now how is that going?

The idea sounded familiar to me, as a Muslim, I fast +30 days a year as I’m not allowed to eat and drink from dawn to sunset… So eating for $1.5 (~= 1 JOD) should be easy… But I got to find out that it’s not easy as all for the coming reasons:
– I live with my family; I don’t pay for the food/drinks so it was kinda hard to estimate what’s worth $1.5/day including water, salt, pepper and all…
– I am on vacation and I’m not going out a lot these days, all the work I do (if any) is online which makes it even harder not to be busy with anything outdoors to forget about eating…
– My father who does not live with us is now here so my mum is cooking the most delicious food ever for him! This is torture yes!
– It has nothing to do with fasting… We’re spending lots and lots of money on our feasts in Ramadan and we keep eating the whole night… This is not what fasting is about…
I had coffee once in these five days and ate salads, banana, grilled chicken, oat soup, some fried potatoes and mini chicken sandwich… How did I manage? I don’t get lots of liquids into my system usually & I used to have no breakfast, one main meal and one type of snacks.

I ought to think that I’m doing harder than anyone else… Seeing food and not being able to eat from while starving is quite challenging… Well, not really… All Live Below The Line challengers are facing nothing compared to those who really live below the line! Why?
– Most participants have planned the five days’ meals and bought the needed food before… What if those who live in extreme poverty are being paid daily? It’s really heard to buy all the meal basics for $1.5.
– The participants are doing that voluntarily and temporarily. We all know that by Saturday we’ll get back to our normal lives and if we ever felt like giving up, we can find food to eat…
– The feeling of insecurity… None of us has felt it for a second.

This is a awareness and fundraising campaign… I’ve tried as much as I can to talk about it (I hope I was not just spamming) and I raised zero dollars for the GPP. But I did not really promote for the fundraising well enough since most people in Jordan know nothing about the GPP… SoI’ll donate what I saved in these 5 days for some local organization (orphanage probably).

Tomorrow is the end of the world, says Harold Camping… I just hope this dude is mistaken… I’d not be really pleased to spend the last five days of my life living under the line (Unless I’m going to heaven!)… No Seriously, I’ve thought of quitting, cheating, or giving myself a pass… But there were always 1.4 billion reasons to keep going… I starved and I sometimes felt like not eating at all… My system got used to eating less… You don’t want to know how it feels to be in hunger… To be unable to feed yourself or your children… How to die because of malnutrition… This is one tough experience I challenge u all to take…
Live Below The Line has raised 1 million euros for charity in only five days! I do dream of a poverty-free world and I believe we can all make poverty history!